Queer Technologies: Derivative Bomb Focus Group Interview Excerpts

Queer Technologies’ Derivative Bomb brings together their earlier projects transCoder, a queer programming anti-language, and Gay Bombs, a how-to manual for building queer activist weapons, to develop a social tool in solidarity with contemporary protest movements against finance capitalism.

Queer Technologies appropriates the derivative, notably referred to as “financial weapons of mass destruction” by Warren Buffet, to build and program a Derivative Bomb that functions as a response and interlocutor to queer struggles for economic autonomy. In basic terms, derivatives are contracts, and therefore, provide a conceptual basis for re-imagining political relationalities, constitutions, and forms of governance.

In their Derivative Bomb Focus Group video, Queer Technologies uses the Derivative Bomb as a catalyst for public dialogue, exploring both how conversation, opinion, and desire are shaped through coercive, obfuscating dynamics as well as expectations for how political art should function in relation to political struggle.